The Fethering Mysteries 11; The Shooting in the Shop

by Simon Brett

  ♦

  “He’ll have to have a general anaesthetic,” said Saira Sherjan.

  “Oh dear, is it very serious?”

  “No, Carole, it’s not very serious. Simply that dogs don’t like having their mouths fiddled about with. And while I could say to a human patient, ‘Now I’m just going to give you an injection of local anaesthetic so that you won’t feel a thing when I stitch up your gum’, it’s difficult to get a dog to take that information on board.”

  “Yes, of course, I take your point,” said Carole, feeling rather stupid.

  But the vet’s grin cheered her. “Simplest if we keep him in overnight. You could take him home later today, but he’ll be a bit woozy and we’d rather have a look at him in the morning, if that’s OK with you…?”

  “Fine,” said Carole. She prided herself on not being one of those people who got sentimental about animals. But she was still surprised to feel a small pang at the thought of spending a night in High Tor without Gulliver.

  “I’ll just give him an injection now to calm him down – not that he looks too much as if he needs calming down…Would you mind just holding him?”

  Carole did as requested and Gulliver, docile as ever, submitted to the injection. Saira led him out of the surgery and returned a moment later. “By the way, do pass on my thanks to Jude for her party last week. I will get around to sending her a card, but you know how it is over Christmas.”

  For a moment Carole was tempted to ask how Saira had come to meet her neighbour, but she decided that the question would be sheer nosiness. Instead, she enquired, “Have you been busy over the holiday?”

  The vet’s fine eyebrows rose ruefully. “And how! I know human beings tend to have a lot of illness over Christmas, and I can understand that, because for many people it is a very stressful time, though how that anxiety communicates itself to animals I don’t know. But it does. It’s been emergency call after emergency call for the whole of the last week. And because I don’t have kids like most of the partners, guess who tends to get lumbered with most of those emergency calls? Rhetorical question.”

  “So you haven’t had any problem in keeping to your no-alcohol routine?”

  “No, I haven’t. I tell you, I’ve forgotten what alcohol smells like. And I’ve forgotten what my bed looks like too. So, Carole, tell me all the Fethering gossip.”

  “I don’t think there is any, really.”

  “Oh, come on. You must have heard some dirt. You’re one of the Fethering Beach dog-walkers, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I know for a fact that dog-walkers constitute one of the most efficient gossip grapevines in the world. Members of the Fethering Beach Dog-walking Mafia exchange all kinds of secrets on their early morning walks.”

  Oh dear, thought Carole, something else I’m missing out on. The most she usually exchanged with another dog-walker was a curt ‘Fethering nod’. To avoid making herself sound completely anti-social (which, it occurred to her, perhaps she was), she told Saira Sherjan that the only topic of conversation in Fethering was still the tragedy at Gallimaufry. “But I expect you’ll have seen all about that on the news.”

  “No. I’ve forgotten what my television looks like, as well as my bed.” She was unable to prevent a large yawn. “Sorry, Carole, but, God, it’s been insanely busy this last week. And actually, I don’t really mind, because I love the animals and I love the work, but…” she mimed propping her eyes open – “I’d be quite glad of an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”

  “I remember,” said Carole, “you said you were going to be on duty the evening of Jude’s party. Was that a busy night?”

  The question was random, merely a politeness, but by serendipity it had been exactly the right thing to ask. “That was one of the worst nights of the lot,” Saira replied. “At least with Gulliver you’ll never have the problem of puppies.”

  “No, he’s the wrong gender, for a start, and then again whatever gender he might once have had has been surgically removed.” When Carole had decided on having a dog for her new life in Fethering, she’d done everything to ensure the minimum of complications.

  “Well, most bitches whelp as easily as shelling peas. They know what to do, they follow their instincts, there’s really no need for a vet to be involved until you get to the point of injections for the puppies. But every now and then you get a really complicated birth, and the one I had that Sunday was the most difficult I’ve ever encountered. I was up all night that night.”

  “What, here in the surgery?”

  “God, no, you can’t move a whelping dog, particularly one who was in as bad a state as this one was.”

  “Did she survive?”

  “Yes, I’m glad to say she did. As did her six puppies. She’s now the proud mother of four dogs and two bitches. All doing well. But it was a long night.”

  “Did you have to go far?”

  “No, just outside Fedborough. It’s…You probably know them. Ricky was at Jude’s party.”

  “Ricky Le Bonnier?”

  “Right. It was their Dalmatian, Spotted Dick – which is a bloody stupid name for a bitch.”

  “So you were actually at their place – Fedingham Court House – all through that Sunday night.”

  “Yes, the call came in from Lola – that’s Ricky’s wife – around five-thirty. I was there within half an hour, and finally left just before eight the following morning.”

  “And was Lola there all the time?”

  “Yes. Poor girl, I felt so sorry for her, because she’d got the problem with the dog whelping, and then one of her kids had an ear infection…between the two of them, she didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

  “And you were with her right through?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “She didn’t leave the house, didn’t go out anywhere?”

  Saira Sherjan was starting to look at Carole rather curiously. Casual conversation seemed to be transforming into interrogation. “She didn’t leave the house all night,” she replied almost brusquely.

  No power on earth could have stopped Carole from asking the next question. “And was Ricky there all the time as well?”

  “No,” said Saira Sherjan. “He went out a few times.”

  ∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧

  Twenty-Two

  “But Saira had no reason to lie,” protested Carole, irritated to find Jude in one of her rare nit-picking devil’s advocate moods.

  “No reason that we know of.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Simply that neither of us knows Saira that well. She may have history with the Le Bonniers about which we have no idea. She could have been another of Lola’s Cambridge contemporaries…or one of Ricky’s many flings with younger women.”

  “Well, the way she talked about the birth of those Dalmatian puppies, I believed every word she said.”

  Jude grinned. “You’re probably right.”

  “I’m sure I am.” Carole was feeling irritable. Partly she was hungry. In the panic of Gulliver’s injury and the rush to the vet’s, she’d missed lunch and the sugar from the buttered teacake she was eating in the sitting room of High Tor hadn’t yet got into her system. Also, though she would never have admitted it even to Jude, she was uncomfortably aware of Gulliver’s absence. More than that, she was actually worried about him. However minor the operation, he was having a general anaesthetic. And anaesthetics could go wrong with dogs just as they could with humans. She couldn’t wait till ten o’clock tomorrow morning when she was due to go back into Fedborough to collect him.

  “So…” Jude mused, “if Saira was telling the truth…” she caught the look in Carole’s eye – “which I’m sure she was, Lola could not possibly have been in the Mercedes 4×4 near Fethering Yacht Club around eight o’clock on that Sunday evening.”

  “Whereas Ricky very definitely could have been.”

  “Yes, but Kath said he was with Lola. So either Kath’s lying
or – ”

  “From the account you gave of her conversation, I’d be disinclined to trust a single word she said.”

  “Yes, all right, Carole, she was sounding extremely loopy, but there seemed to be a logic – albeit a strange one – in most of what she told me.”

  “Think back to her exact words, Jude. Did Kath actually mention Lola by name?”

  “No, she said she wasn’t interested in the names of Ricky’s Devil Women.”

  Carole snorted. “And you describe her as someone capable of logic.”

  “But she must have been talking about Lola. Kath said she was the latest Devil Woman to seduce Ricky away from her.”

  “Well, maybe, given his reputation as a philanderer, he’s moved on to another Devil Woman since he’s been married to Lola.” Carole sniffed contemptuously; she’d made the suggestion as a bitter joke against the male gender. But when she thought about what she’d said…Carole’s blue eyes fixed on her friend’s brown ones and she came to the realization first. “Do you think he might have started up an affair with someone else?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose. But who…?”

  “I think I know,” said Carole with quiet confidence.

  “Who?”

  “Anna.”

  “What do you base that on?”

  “The way she behaved, things she said when I talked to her on the beach on Boxing Day. I didn’t really notice at the time, but she kept defending Ricky. She said he had talked to her about Polly. Somehow, the way she said it implied she talked to him quite a lot. And then when her mobile rang, she grabbed it like she was desperate for a call. And when I told her about Polly having been shot, she said that must have got Ricky very preoccupied. She seemed obscurely pleased about that…maybe because it explained why he hadn’t called her.”

  Jude looked sceptical. “You’re making a few rather big leaps of logic, Carole.”

  “No, I’m convinced I’m on the right track.”

  “I wonder if there’s any way of confirming your thesis…” Jude tapped her chin as she tried to think of something.

  “You don’t have a phone number for Kath?” asked Carole suddenly. “She’d be able to tell us who was with Ricky in the car, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes, but I don’t have a number for her.”

  “Might Ted have one?”

  “I doubt it. Can’t think of any reason why he should. I suppose I could ask him to alert me again next time she’s in the Crown and Anchor, but I think she’s mostly there at lunchtime, so there’s no chance till tomorrow.”

  “What about contacting her at work?”

  “Well, I know she does the books for Ayland’s, the boatyard. But they would shut up for the full Christmas break, wouldn’t they, Carole?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of people keep their boats there, people who don’t like all the snobbery attached to the Fethering Yacht Club, so there must be someone on duty over the holiday.”

  Carole found the number of Ayland’s and passed the handset to Jude. They were in luck. The call was answered by Kath herself. She seemed unsurprised by the enquiry, and confirmed that the Devil Woman she had seen with Ricky in his car at the relevant time had heavy lipstick and peroxide blond hair. Jude asked whether she knew if the two of them were having an affair, but all Kath would say was, “She’s his latest Devil Woman, the one from the shop.”

  As soon as Jude switched the phone off, Carole, who had pieced the conversation together from her end, announced triumphantly, “I knew it. That Anna is far too glammed up for her age.”

  “Are you suggesting that a woman who makes herself look like that deserves everything that’s coming to her?” suggested Jude mischievously.

  “Yes,” said Carole, unaware of any irony. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She rubbed her thin hands up and down against each other. “Hm…well, I know a fairly foolproof way of making sure my path crosses with Anna’s.” An expression of irritation crossed her face. “Or I would if had Gulliver with me. I’ll have to wait till he’s back from the vet’s.”

  “Carole,” said Jude gently, “it is possible for a person to take a walk on Fethering Beach without a dog, you know.”

  “Oh, is it?”

  “Yes, I’ve done it many times myself.”

  “Have you really?” said Carole, bemused by the alien concept.

  ♦

  When she got back to Woodside Cottage Jude found a couple of messages on her answering machine from clients who needed her services. In both cases a back problem had recurred, and in both cases Jude felt pretty confident that the relapse had the same cause. The tensions of family Christmases were reflected by increases not only in consultations with lawyers about divorce, but also in stress-related illness.

  Knowing the level of neurosis in the two clients who’d left messages, Jude realized that the sessions would be long and arduous, and she would have to expend at least as much energy in listening as she did in healing.

  As a result, by the time she made it back to Woodside Cottage she was totally washed out. She cooked a self-indulgent fry-up for supper, had a couple of glasses of wine and contemplated watching something mindless on television before falling into bed. But, as she reached for the remote, she noticed and picked up the copy of One Classy Lady that Flora Le Bonnier had given her.

  Jude looked first at the title page. No ghost writer was acknowledged, which possibly (though by no means definitely) meant that Flora had written the book herself.

  She flicked through the first chapter, which made much of Flora’s connection with the aristocratic Le Bonnier family. Without positively stating that she was the illegitimate daughter of the Graham Le Bonnier who was killed in the Western Desert, the implication was definitely there. It was also implied that Flora had been unaware of her ancestry during her girlhood. Only when she joined the Rank Charm School did she become interested in her family background, and it was then that her connection with the Le Bonniers was proved. Though what the nature of that proof was, the autobiography did not specify.

  Jude moved on to the pages of photographs, of which, given the range of their subject’s career, there were many. Jude was struck, as Carole had been when watching Her Wicked Heart, by how stunningly beautiful Flora Le Bonnier had been in her prime. Most of the photographs were either posed studio portraits, official production publicity shots or movie stills. Almost none of them gave any insight into Flora Le Bonnier’s private life.

  There was just one, showing her with a two-year-old Ricky and that, too, was a highly professional piece of work in black and white, mother and child artfully displayed on a metal bench in some lavish garden. That was it; nothing else of a personal nature. There were no family album snaps, none which might show their subject in an unguarded moment. Having spent the morning with Flora, Jude concluded that the actress’s life had contained very few unguarded moments.

  Moving to the index, she found a mere half-dozen references to ‘Ricky’. None to ‘Richard’, so maybe the child had been christened with the shortened name, or maybe he had just always been called that. The mentions of him in the book were all similar in tone. Ricky was ‘a delightful child’, ‘the greatest joy that life had brought me’, ‘a prodigiously talented musician’. Like the photograph in the garden, there was something posed and sanitized about the references.

  Only on one occasion did what could have been genuine emotion break through the carefully written text. Flora Le Bonnier was about to begin a six-month tour to Australia, playing Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan. She wrote:

  The thought of leaving three-year-old Ricky for such a long time stabbed through my heart like a sliver of ice. No amount of public adulation from antipodean audiences could make up for the sense of bleak bereavement I felt at that moment.

  It sounded heartfelt, but the extravagance of the language still made Jude ambivalent about the sincerity of the sentiments expressed.

  She tried to analyse what she knew about the relatio
nship between Ricky and his mother. The only time she had seen them together, at her open house, Flora had seemed almost to worship her son. But then, when she’d talked to Kath, she’d been told: “Ricky was looked after by his aunt, because his mother was always off acting all over the world.” Given the fact that Ricky and Kath had gone to the same village school, that aunt must have lived near to Fethering. Jude wondered idly whether she’d been Flora’s sister. Or indeed whether she was still alive. And, if so, where?

  She scoured the index and flicked through the text, but could find no reference in One Classy Lady to Polly Le Bonnier. There was no mention of any of Ricky’s marriages. All Jude could find in the book which related to his adult career was the one sentence: “My son’s artistic talents developed in a different way from my own, and he made a huge success developing new talents in the heady ‘pop music’ scene of the late sixties and early seventies.”

  More interesting, from Jude’s point of view, was the fact that there was no mention at all of who Ricky’s father had been. No reference, so far as a fairly exhaustive flick through the pages of One Classy Lady could establish, to any husbands or lovers in the life of Flora Le Bonnier.

  ∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧

  Twenty-Three

  Carole Seddon woke early the following morning, denying to herself that she was feeling the absence of Gulliver from his usual base in front of the Aga. She washed and dressed briskly, determined to put into action her revolutionary plan of taking a walk on Fethering Beach without the excuse of a dog.

  The timing was, of course, pivotal and, being Carole, she reached the Promenade at seven-twenty, even though she knew there was no chance of Anna appearing with her Black-Watch-clad Westie until half past. Risking the ever-present danger of looking like a sad old pensioner, Carole sat in one of the seafront shelters and waited.

  It was a cold day, the weather seeming to reflect the general feeling that everyone had had enough of Christmas jollity, and couldn’t wait to get back to the normality of the forthcoming year.